Gary's jazz journey

LONG before Jools Holland began conjuring big band sounds tinged with a flavour of ska, Gary Crosby was doing something very similar with his band Jazz Jamaica. They play the city on February 10. LONG before Jools Holland began conjuring big band sounds tinged with a flavour of ska, Gary Crosby was doing something very similar with his band Jazz Jamaica. They play the city on February 10.

LONG before Jools Holland began conjuring big band sounds tinged with a flavour of ska, Gary Crosby was doing something very similar with his band Jazz Jamaica.

Some Jazz Jamaica veterans, including trombone player Rico Rodriguez, even ended up in Jools Holland's Rhythm And Blues Orchestra.

Asked whether he now casts a wistful eye in the direction of the omni-present Jools, with his weekly TV showcase, Later ...With Jools Holland, Crosby says: "What I do think is... I wonder why they don't give me the gig. I've known them for years. They've known of what we're doing."

Jazz Jamaica may not yet have had the TV exposure they deserve, but they have built a worldwide reputation as crowd-pleasers. And, as they head out on the road again, their winning collision of brassy jazz and Jamaican rhythms has another twist: they have recently reggae-fied some of the best-known songs from the Motown canon.

The most intriguing track from their album, Motorcity Roots, is What's Going On? , Marvin Gaye's classic hymn of peace and brotherhood.

Community

"I'm of the Afro-Caribbean community, and I believe it is one of the big problems that some of the role models they use are not good," explains Crosby. "We needed someone to speak that lyric. No-one can sing it like Marvin Gaye. In the light of what is happening today, I wanted that message to hit as well as the music. Bill Morris rang a bell in my head and he was up for it straight away."

Keeping most un-musicianly hours, Sir Bill arrived at the recording studio, did his bit and was on his way home by 10.30am, just as Crosby was arriving.

Crosby felt an affinity with Motown not just because of the music, but also the way the company operated, with a close-knit family of stars. His own Dune Records, an independent jazz label, is a similarly tight group, including the likes of saxophonists Denys Baptiste and Soweto Kinch and several of the Jazz Jamaica line-up.

"We are all part of the Dune Records family," says Crosby. "We all work on each other's albums and we all support each other outside of music as well. I am godfather to Denys Baptiste's children."

Now aged 51, Crosby was born in London of Jamaican parentage (his uncle is the great Jamaican guitarist Ernest Ranglin) and grew up listening to ska music. In the late 1960s, the UK saw a boom in the popularity of Jamaican music, much of it delivered here by the Trojan Records label.

"We should do a tribute to Trojan for what they have done for multi-culturalism," says Crosby. "They helped introduce aspects of Jamaican culture to England, and it was working class England, if I remember right."

Ska

Bizarrely, ska and reggae was taken to heart particularly by Britain's white skinheads.

"I used to go to clubs with these guys. We went to school together," says Crosby. At the age of 19, Crosby began playing double bass, teaming up with west African musicians to play jazz, soul and calypso.

"I was almost at the point when I was ready to pack up. I was an electrician, and I was juggling these two careers for four or five years, and then a friend of mine gave my name to Courtney Pine," he says.

Caught up in the British jazz boom of the 1980s, Crosby was able to give up the day job to gig with saxophonist Pine.

"I took a trip to Jamaica in 1989 with Courtney Pine and he was a big celebrity there," Crosby recalls. "People were saying: `Do something for us, about us. Lift our music out of its status'.

"I thought about it and decided I wanted to get more involved in Jamaican jazz." Convening Jazz Jamaica in 1991, Crosby found himself reviving a part of Jamaican culture that had been overlooked even in Jamaica itself.

"Big bands were an integral part of Jamaican music in the 1940s, playing Duke Ellington, Count Basie, whatever chart music they could get," he says.

"But jazz seems to have lost its base in the 1960s. A lot of the finest reggae musicians - Ernest Ranglin, Monty Alexander, Sonny Bradshaw - do not see themselves as reggae musicians. They see themselves as jazz musicians who were moonlighting or doing session work."

Jazz Jamaica play at the Zion Arts Centre, Hulme, on Friday, February 10. £14.50. Call 0161 907 9000. The album, Motorcity Roots, is out now on Dune Records.